I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone

by Stephanie Kuehnert

  “Why? You don’t deserve it. You’ve had everything handed to you, everything I’ve wanted, and you need to learn how to appreesshhiate it,” he slurred.

  “Johnny, I do appreciate it, but Regan was—”

  “Oh, shut up, Emily!” He withdrew the pocketknife he always carried and slashed along the neck of my guitar, slicing all the strings.

  The little twang they made as they snapped sounded like a child crying out. I was done talking. I leapt at Johnny, swinging for his jaw. My fist connected with the cigarette that dangled from the corner of his mouth, burning my knuckles slightly but his upper lip far worse.

  He screamed, flinging his hands up to his face. “You bitch! I’ll kill you!”

  I snatched the guitar from his lap and ran with it into the bathroom, where I promptly locked the door. Being sober, my reflexes were good, but if I’d been thinking clearly, I would have run out the front door. Instead, I sat down on the toilet and examined the neck of the guitar to see if he’d scratched the wood when he cut the strings. Then I noticed the swollen blister across my middle and ring fingers, and as soon as I caught sight of that, my hand started to throb. Survival instincts kicking in, I prepared to dash for the front door. But Johnny was now on the other side.

  “Let me in!” he thundered.

  I backed away from the door as he pounded on it.

  “Emily, don’t think I can’t break this door down!” He heaved his body against it and it shuddered. My first instinct was to protect the guitar, knowing that I was far less breakable than it was. I threw a towel down in the bathtub and laid the guitar on top of it.

  Johnny changed his approach, kicking the door. I heard the wood splinter. I closed the shower curtain, hoping that if he didn’t see the guitar, he would forget about it. I pivoted to face the sink, scanning it for anything I could use as a weapon.

  The door broke open. Johnny lost his balance and fell forward into me, a blur of limbs flushed an angry crimson.

  “Get off me!” I shoved him backward, sending him stumbling into the wall, tripping over the laces of his sneakers and the toilet. Johnny was several inches taller than I was, but he probably only weighed about thirty pounds more, and as drunk as he was, I doubted his ability to get the upper hand after he fell. I shouldn’t have.

  I ran immediately for the front door, but as soon as I unbolted it, he pinned me against it with his body, his chest pressed against my back, his legs straddling mine. He shouted, “Don’t leave me, Emily,” words contorting midsentence so the last part of it sounded like a sob. His drunkenness had taken him from furious at me to afraid of losing me. I was beyond confused. I had no idea what the fight was about anymore, but I still needed to escape. I elbowed him in the ribs and he groaned, but he didn’t double over as I hoped he would.

  “Get the fuck off of me!” I shrieked, and luckily that scream was punctuated by a police siren roaring down the street. My eyes widened with the hope that one of our yuppie neighbors had actually decided to call the police. I let out a bloodcurdling yelp. “Get off—”

  Johnny clamped his left hand over my mouth, suddenly as aware of our surroundings as I was. “Shut up!” he rasped. “Someone’s going to call the cops.” He tried to wrench me away from the door, bending my neck backward with all the pressure he had on my mouth. I bit into the flesh of his palm.

  He recoiled enough for me to shout, “I want someone to call—” Then his hand went back over my mouth, and I felt a prick in my right side. I almost bit him again, but I realized that somehow, drunk as he was, he’d managed to keep ahold of his goddamn knife. It was in his right fist, the blade pointing inward, aimed just above my hip. I was trapped.

  His tone shifted, became creepily soothing. “Don’t make me cut you, Emily. I don’t want to. This has gotten really out of control, baby. We don’t need to get arrested. Let’s just talk. I love you, Emily.”

  Love? This was not how people who were in love behaved. I wanted to tell Johnny that, but I’d frozen at the realization that I, Emily Black, had somehow ended up in a relationship with a guy who had a knife pressed in very close proximity to one of my major organs—liver, kidneys, whatever was located on the right side of my body.

  Even as I tried to think of a way to get out of the situation, all I could do was wonder how I’d missed the warning signs that Johnny was capable of something like this. He’d been a bastard at times, but I really never saw it coming. The same way, I realized, I had never ever imagined anyone could hurt Louisa.

  I mean, my mother, raped? In every other tale about her, she was so strong. And I prided myself on taking after her in that way. Like her, I was tough. Unbreakable. Indestructible. And yet I had no idea how to get away from Johnny.

  Then, suddenly, Johnny dropped the knife. I was so freaked that I didn’t recognize why he did it, or why he backed away from me, but then I heard the voice that he obviously had. “Police! Open up!” it boomed.

  I lifted my trembling hand and opened the door to find two of Chicago’s finest standing on the other side. I never thought a day would come that I would be so happy to see a cop.

  While Johnny fled for the bathroom, trying unsuccessfully to close the busted door on a male officer who was built like a marine, I met the steely eyes of the policewoman who stood in front of me. The way her black hair was combed back into a bun beneath her cap, pulling her skin taut, gave her a severe appearance, but the longer she looked at me, the more she softened. I don’t remember saying anything, but the officers seemed to know right away that I was the victim. After I told her everything, she asked, “Do you want to come down to the station and press charges?”

  “No. I just don’t ever want to see him again.”

  Annoyed with my response, she huffed, “If you don’t press charges against him, all we can get him on is disturbing the peace. He could come back here and try to kill you all over again.”

  I glanced over my shoulder into the bathroom, where Johnny sat on the toilet with his arms wrapped around his knees like a shamed child while Marine Cop berated him. “He wasn’t really trying to kill me …” But remembering the knife in my side, something that I never thought him capable of doing, I relented. “I don’t know, maybe I need a restraining order or something. But can we do this quickly? I just need to go home. To my dad’s. In Wisconsin.”

  THE BLACK NOTEBOOKS

  After leaving the police station around two in the morning, I shoved crates of CDs, records, and tapes into the trunk of my car. Fortunately, I kept that stuff pristinely organized, so even in my rush I didn’t leave anything behind. Clothes were another story. I grabbed a basket of dirty laundry and everything I saw hanging in the closet and tossed it all in the backseat. I ran around the apartment throwing random items into a backpack, but I left behind a bunch of stuff, including my favorite July Lies T-shirt. I remembered the most important things, though.

  I set my wounded guitar in its hard plastic case and piled it on top of the clothes. And then there was the photo of Louisa that I’d kept framed on the stereo speaker in my room at home. After I’d moved out, I tucked it away between the pages of a book and only looked at it when Johnny wasn’t around. At least I hadn’t shared that little piece of my soul with him, I thought. I slipped the picture out and dumped the book—a stupid collection of fairy tales my dad used to read to me as a kid that I’d known Johnny would never flip through.

  The photo lay on the seat beside me as I sped out of Chicago. It was a black-and-white my father had taken. Louisa had his guitar in her lap, gently resting against her pregnant belly. A smile lifted her lips, but her eyes seemed haunted. It reminded me of the iconic photographs they always put on the cover of Rolling Stone when a rock star dies. The kind of pictures that trigger admiration, sorrow, and so many questions in the viewer’s mind.

  I glanced at it as I crossed over into Wisconsin. Questions were the only thing bringing me back to Carlisle. I did not want to slink home after less than a year. Maybe Dad had thought it was the pla
ce to go when things got rough, but I did not want to follow in his footsteps.

  As I turned onto Highway PW, my stomach sunk and I felt sicker with each sign I passed that warned of a change in speed limit. There was a pattern to them on the county highways. When you were surrounded by wide-open fields, you could go fifty-five. As the farms got closer together and you reached the outskirts of a town, it dropped to forty-five. Then it plummeted to twenty-five, becoming the strip that locals knew as Main Street.

  When I reached Carlisle’s Main Street at six in the morning, I caught sight of Mrs. Jones hobbling up to the front of her store. She turned and watched my car as it passed. I knew she recognized me despite the cloak of early morning shadows. She’d tell her first customer, “Emily Black is back. Didn’t even last in the big city as long as her daddy. Came crawling back alone just like he did, too.”

  And with my luck, the customer would be some evil person I went to high school with, like Jackie Jenkins. She’d smirk and say, “So much for her stupid band.”

  That image, along with the memories of finding Regan in a pool of blood and the sensation of Johnny’s knife against my side, pushed me into the darkest place I’d ever been. When I arrived at my father’s house, instead of going for the coffee that had started to auto-brew, I grabbed a bottle of red wine from the top of the fridge and yanked the cork out. I slumped at the round kitchen table to wallow in my lowest low.

  The bottle of wine had been three-quarters full and I’d nearly put it away by the time my dad got up at six thirty. The summer sun streamed in through the windows that lined three of the four kitchen walls, lit up the creamy countertops, and stretched lazily across the golden oak floor. I sat in the darkest corner of the room, holding my head in my hands, hair draped like a veil over my face and down my shoulders. I only parted that black curtain to tip the bottle into my mouth. I drank sloppily, letting droplets of wine settle into the cracks in my lips, blending with my faded lipstick.

  My father sleepily slurred, “Lou—” before catching himself and exclaiming, “Emily!” I’m sure he’d never wanted to see me looking the way I did, but he’d probably always expected to find her like that.

  I raised my head to look at him. I’d been so lost in thought, I hadn’t heard the creak of the stairs and the floor in the hallway as he approached. “Dad,” I said weakly, blinking at him with bloodshot eyes.

  He ran around the table, parental instincts kicking in and shocking him awake. Kneeling beside my chair and clasping my hand, he asked, “I’ve been worrying since Luke called and told me about Regan. Why didn’t you call me? I left you all those messages. Or did you come straight from the hospital?”

  “You left messages?” The pain in my voice turned to ire. “Then he heard the messages. He knew exactly what was going on!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I jerked my hand out of my father’s, and my fingers flew around the neck of the wine bottle. I took an angry swig, wine streaking my chin. “That asshole Johnny,” I raged, slamming the bottle down.

  My dad snatched it away from me, setting it out of my reach. “What about Johnny?”

  “You see this?” I flipped back my hair to reveal scratches on my neck. “And this?” I pointed to bruises on both arms. “When I came home from the hospital he freaked out and tried to kill me and the police came. He was pissed because we’d missed the gig he’d set up. But he knew why we’d missed it all along because I’m sure he got your messages—”

  I stopped when I heard the wine bottle crash. Dad had flung out his arm and violently swiped it off the table as he stood. The bottle didn’t shatter, but the wine that was left inside broke like a red wave across the floor. His eyes were black. “Is he in jail? You better tell me he’s locked up right now because otherwise I will kill him,” he gnashed through gritted teeth.

  I swallowed hard; I’d never seen him so angry. With his jaw clamped in rage, his fists clenched, biceps bulging, and posture stiff, he looked like a completely different man. “They told me that in … domestic disputes,” I spat the words, “they have to take someone in and they said it was obvious that he was the one who … I got an emergency restraining order, but they told me to think about pressing assault charges, to come to the station this morning and do it or they couldn’t hold him after that.”

  “What are you doing here, then? Why didn’t you call me so I could come down there? Jesus Christ, let me get my keys so we can drive back to Chicago.” He pivoted, heading for the back door, but stopped midstep when I let out a high-pitched shriek.

  “No, Daddy, I just want it to be over!” I dropped my head into my hands again.

  His anger disappeared as quickly as it had come, and he rushed back over to me. I wrapped my arms loosely around his neck and buried my face in his shoulder, breathing in the comforting smell of him. “I shouldn’t have let you go. I never should have let you go,” he murmured into my hair.

  I wanted more than anything to sob like I was small again. But even as I felt my father’s tears dampen my hair, I couldn’t cry. I pressed my hand against his cheek, trying to absorb the wetness and the repeated mantra of “I shouldn’t have let you go.” I said, “You couldn’t have stopped me, but I shouldn’t have left.”

  He guided my hand away from his cheek and cradled it in both of his hands, studying me. “I shouldn’t have let her leave.”

  My thin eyebrows wrinkled in confusion. “Dad, you couldn’t have stopped me,” I repeated.

  He stood up, letting my hand slide out of his. “No, I mean your mother. I shouldn’t have let her leave us.” He paced toward the coffeepot to pour himself a cup, only to spill a quarter of it as he sat back down. “There’s so much more you could have had, stuff you needed, if she’d been around.”

  He had never said anything like this, and it alarmed me. “Dad”—I reached across the table toward him—“all I’ve ever needed is you.”

  He curled his fingers into a fist and shook his head violently. “No, you should’ve had her, and you should have had all of me, not this cripple that I’ve been because she left me.” He beat his fist against his heart.

  “Dad, you weren’t like that!”

  “Emily!” he snapped, but his voice immediately softened with regret. “I couldn’t even visit you because that city reminds me too much of her. She’s been gone for nearly nineteen years and god knows how many nights I spent thinking about her instead of giving you what you need.”

  “It’s okay.” I squeezed his hand to reassure him. Then I refocused on what I’d come to him for. “You can give me what I need now.”

  He squeezed my hand back. “Anything.”

  But as I spoke, his expression changed from concerned to questioning to full of doubt. “I need the truth. When I drove into town this morning, the first thing I saw was Mrs. Jones and I imagined the way she’s going to talk about me. And don’t say she’s not going to. People talk about us, Dad. About us and about Louisa. Remember how I would come home crying about it? You always said, ‘Just don’t listen, Emily. Those people don’t know anything about your mother.’ And then you’d tell me some cute little story about you and her. About how Luke and Molly and Marissa came down for your wedding and Marissa cried because she wanted Louisa to hold her during the ceremony, so you guys got married with Marissa on Louisa’s hip. Or how all Louisa listened to while she was pregnant with me was Patti Smith, so no wonder I came out wanting to be a rock star. And those stories were fine when I was a kid. I just wanted to find out as much as I could about my mother. But still, every time I went anywhere, people put their heads together and whispered. I’d hear her name, yours, mine, Molly’s, Eric Lisbon’s—”

  Dad cut me off with a growl. “What about Eric Lisbon?”

  I glared at him. “I don’t know, Dad. Why don’t you tell me? ’Cause I’m not supposed to believe them, right? I’m not supposed to believe that her poor, lovesick boyfriend Eric killed himself because you stole her from him. I’m sure there’s ano
ther explanation, right? And what about the thing that Regan just told me? She said she overheard Molly saying that Eric Lisbon raped Louisa. Is that true?” Tears finally streamed down my face and I started to shake. “Was Louisa weak just like me?”

  “You are not weak. You’re tough, you’re smart, you’re a brilliant musician—”

  “Answer the goddamn question, Dad! Did Eric Lisbon rape Louisa? Is that why she left?”

  My father sighed and for the first time in my life, he couldn’t meet my eyes. He stared into his coffee. “She … Your mother left because she …” He stopped and rubbed his temples like he was fighting bad memories. “You know why your mother left. She was a free spirit. She wanted to tour with bands, follow punk rock.”

  “That’s a fairy tale,” I scoffed. “A bedtime story you used to tell me. After what happened yesterday, I can’t believe in it anymore. I watched my best friend practically die because I was too wrapped up in my stupid music to notice she had a problem.”

  “Emily, don’t call your music stupid …”

  “Tell me the truth!” I banged the table for emphasis. “What did she do? Or what did someone do to her that she just couldn’t live with?”

  I waited a long time for him to respond, but he just shook his head slowly back and forth. Finally I rose, heading for the back door.

  “Where are you going?” He shot out of his chair.

  “If you won’t tell me the truth, I’ll go find it.”

  He trailed after me down the back steps to the driveway. “What does that mean? Emily, please come back here!”

  Before I opened the driver’s door, I went to the door behind it and yanked my guitar out of the backseat. “You can have your guitar back, Dad. I’m not playing music anymore.” I slid the case across the gravel toward him.

  “Emily!” he cried. “Don’t do this. Don’t leave me like she did.”

  I turned and glared at him, holding the car door open, ready to hop in. “I’m not. ’Cause she left to follow the music, right? I’m running away from it. My obsession with it almost killed my best friend, and Johnny’s obsession with it almost killed me.”